Human Technology Centre - RWTH Aachen

EET aims at an ethical evaluation of different energy policies. With respect to energy supply and demand and their impacts on our natural environment and thus on human beings, our objective is to bridge the gap between empirical forecasts on the one hand, and ethical and epistemological evaluations on the other hand.

A model is developed projecting the impact of future energy supply and demand on human well-being. Thereby our focus is on the “big picture”: Firstly, energy policies are investigated not only as regards, say, their impact on the climate, but also on other areas that affect the lives of people. Secondly, we focus on the global effects on large time scales, i.e. 50 and 100 years.

In quantifying human well-being, our main concern is not only with the preferences humans indeed have, rather we orient ourselves by the United Nations Human Development Index that rests on the welfare-ethical work by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. The work of EET will thus provides not only information on the different impacts different energy policies may have on overall resource consumption and need satisfaction, rather EET aims also at an outline of an ethically sustainable policy.